Educational Programming Record (EPR)

The EPR serves many purposes. Its most basic purpose is to keep a record of the programs your unit offers. But with the data you enter, you can assess a variety of aspects of the programs you offer. See the next question for additional ideas.

If you’ve entered accurate and detailed information, you can learn quite a bit about your programs, specifically related to attendance. Attendance is not the only determining factor of a program’s success, but it can be helpful in identifying possible trends that may positively or negatively affect participation.

Once you export your data (more on how to do that below) into Excel, you can easily view programs by attendance to see which were well attended versus poorly attended. You can then look into other factors that might have impacted attendance.

Some questions to ask or trends to note are:

• How were programs marketed and did different campaign strategies affect attendance?
• Did time-related factors impact attendance (e.g., time of year, finals week, time of day, competition with other events)?
• Do certain topics tend to generate more/less interest than others?
• Are some programs consistently poorly attended?

Additionally, if you offer programs as part of a series and indicate that accurately in each record, you can filter out programs by series to view the performance of each event within the series and the series as a whole.

Using the data exported from the EPR can assist you in making data-driven decisions about changes to your program offerings.

Please contact the EPR administrator for your area or, if none, the SARA staff at saraoffice@psu.edu or 814-863-1809 to request access to enter data. If you need the level of access that will allow you to also add or remove users, your supervisor will need to contact us to request your access.

Please note that only users with EPR administrator access can add or de-activate users.

To add a user...

1. Choose the "Users" tab.
2. Enter the access ID of the user in the field under "Add New User." (The access ID is the e-mail address without "@psu.edu.") Click on the "Add User" button.
3. Under the "Activate/De-Activate User" section, be sure the box marked "User Active" is checked.
4. Under the "Role" section, select on the box marked "Reporter."
5. Under the "Campus/Units" section, find your campus and select the units the user will be entering data for.
6. Click on the box at the bottom of the page marked "Update User."

To de-activate a user...

1. Choose the "Users" tab.
2. Under the "Search Existing Users" section, enter the access ID of the user in the field next to "Search by Access ID or Name" then click on the box to the right. 
3. Once the entry has been populated, click on "select" by the user's information.
4. Under the "Activate/De-Activate User" section, uncheck the box marked "User Active."
5. Click on the box at the bottom of the page marked "Update User."

We recommend that you enter data on a regular basis—preferably weekly, monthly, or after the completion of a program or event. Waiting to enter all programs at once for an entire year often leads to errors in data accuracy.

Gathering your information before logging into the EPR will make the process quicker. You will want to know the following:

• Co-sponsoring Student Affairs unit (For more on determining and entering co-sponsors, see the next question.)
• Other units involved (non-Student Affairs or non-PSU entities)
• Type of program (workshop, information fair, social activity, spiritual activity)
• Program date
• Program series name, if applicable
• User ID of the presenters
• Was the program assessed?
• Estimated attendance, if not calculated via card swipe
• Primary audience
• Was the program presented to a class?
• Did the program pertain to Penn State Reads, diversity issues, or sustainability?
• Did the program educate on the following compliance topics: fire safety, drugs/alcohol, dating/sexual violence or harassment, bystander intervention, or other safety/security issues not listed here?

If you collaborated with a community group or other University entity that is NOT a unit within Student Affairs, type those into the "Other Unit" field.

Look for the following field within the first section of the EPR record-entry page:

If you co-sponsored a program/event with one or more Student Affairs units, we recommend you determine which unit will be responsible for making the entry in the EPR. For accuracy, the program should only be entered once.

Please note: A “co-sponsor” for EPR purposes is any unit that worked collaboratively to bring a program to fruition or one unit is putting on the program and others are presenting at that program.

To ensure that all participating units are credited for the program, select them from the list near the top of the page:

For the purposes of the EPR, the only programs that should be entered are planned and scheduled events. These include ice cream socials, study sessions, trips to locations on and off campus, and group movie/TV/sports broadcast viewings, just to name a few. Impromptu chats and watching TV together that is not scheduled/announced are not programs that should be entered into the EPR.

Entries you have made for the current reporting period (May 15 – May 14) should be visible to you on your home page upon logging into the EPR. You can click on “Select” for any of these to edit or to view additional information. To access older entries or to pull a report, complete the following steps:

1. Chose the “Export Data” tab on the far right.
2. Click on your unit name from the list.
3. Enter the beginning and end dates you want to view in a MM-DD-YYYY format.
4. Click the “Search” button.
5. Once the entries have been populated under “EPR Results,” you can select the entries you wish to view or you can export to Excel by clicking the “Export Results” button above the grid of entries.
6. To get data on attendance, select all the cells under the column labeled "eprestattend" then hover over the gray box that appears to the left of the column. Click on the drop-down arrow and select "Convert to Number."

Probably. We are currently vetting new products that will replace the EPR as well as other student-organization and event-management systems. SARA insists that any such product will be user-friendly and intuitive.